


Things Are Not When They Appear

by Aris Merquoni (ArisTGD)



Category: Sapphire and Steel
Genre: 1000-3000 words, Case Fic, Gen, Yuletide, Yuletide 2009, string theory, time travel paradox
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 20:08:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArisTGD/pseuds/Aris%20Merquoni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sapphire and Steel are sent to investigate a breach--but they arrive to find that they may have already failed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things Are Not When They Appear

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my betas, and thanks to my recipient for the prompt!

As they were assigned, one of the first senses that came to Sapphire and Steel was that of light--understanding it, its form and shape, the refractions and reflections and frequencies and harmonies all up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. So it was more or less accurate to say that the first thing they saw when they stepped into the room was their own dead bodies on the floor.

"Don't--" Steel said as he felt Sapphire lean forward beside him. He shut his eyes, shut other senses down, too, senses that were only starting to unfold in this present instant. "Don't look. If we have too much information--"

"We'll lock in the timeline," Sapphire finished his thought.

"Yes."

They had been trained, both of them, in what to do if this ever occurred. They both had the ability to see more of time and reality than any human could--which could prove fatal. At the moment, it appeared very strongly that they were dead, but as long as they weren't _certain,_ there was a possibility, a slim one, that they were wrong.

Time had a lot of tricks it could play.

When Steel opened his eyes again, he could sense no more than a normal human could. Sapphire was looking around the rest of the room, carefully averting her eyes from the two... figures on the floor.

"Well?" he said.

"This takes longer this way, you know," she replied.

He nodded and looked around himself. The room was some kind of foyer; large glass doors on one end, which were closed against a rainy evening. Facing the doors was a desk, and behind the desk was a door, slightly ajar. The walls and the door were painted a soothing, sterile beige, and the whole room smelled faintly of carpet cleaner.

Sapphire had picked her way over to the desk and was reading the day planner atop it. Steel took her distraction as a chance to look over the dead bodies again.

They were lying on their backs, feet toward the door, as though they had been knocked off their feet. Steel looked away before he could take in the expression on Sapphire's still face.

"Nineteen eighty-one," Sapphire said from the desk.

Steel walked over. "The date?"

"Yes. The building is recent; no more than thirty years, from the architecture." She was standing tall with her fingers lightly brushing the pages of the calendar.

"What's the company do?" he asked.

"It's a research facility," she said. "Engineering, something to do with energy."

"And time," Steel added.

"And time," she agreed.

He could almost feel the lack of that sense; it was like being muffled in cotton not being able to feel the break they had been sent to investigate.

"Do you think the breach is entirely man-made?" Sapphire asked.

He nodded. "In a place like this, that's what I'd guess. Still. Keep your eyes open."

The door led to a short hallway. On their left when they moved inside was a bank of windows looking into an empty room, lit by concentric banks of fluorescent lights. There was another open doorway ahead of them, through which they could see a bank of computers.

"Control room?" Sapphire asked.

Steel nodded, and moved into the room ahead of her.

The computers were humming, and on one wall a tape readout was ticking away symbols onto its paper spool. There was a control console and a door which lead into the empty room they'd seen before. No one was there.

"Where are the operators?" Steel asked rhetorically.

"It's a Saturday," Sapphire said. "It's not likely they'd be doing research on the weekend."

"So the breach was caused by an accident," he guessed. He gestured at the bank of switches, the meterological instruments. "A faulty wire, a mis-programmed computer."

Sapphire shrugged and bent down to peer at the log book. Steel took a deep breath and moved to her back. The lights flickered at a steady hundred cycles per second, illuminating the neat rows of notebooks, cold laminate floors, the closed doors marked 'Storage' and 'Break Room' in neat sans-serif labels.

"If nobody was here today, why were the lights on when we arrived?" he asked.

"It's possible they weren't," Sapphire replied, "and we turned them on before we met our unfortunate end in the lobby."

"Don't speak of it," he snapped.

Sapphire looked at him. He couldn't meet her eyes for a moment. "Have you discovered anything?"

"The last entry was from this morning. A Dr. Witteridge. He discusses a start-up test for an oscillator." She straightened up and nodded in the direction of the large, empty room. "Apparently its focus was in that test room."

"Oscillating what?"

"I'm not sure." There was a slight hint of trouble in her gaze; a tightness around her eyes that he hadn't seen in a long time. "If I go in and study the room--"

"You're talking about opening up your senses again," Steel said. She nodded, and he felt a sudden fear, like freezing, like the coldness of absolute zero. "You'll be putting yourself in mortal danger."

Her smile was unexpected. "Isn't that our responsibility?" she asked. "You'll keep watch for me, and it'll only be a moment."

He shook his head. "You'll be putting both of us at risk. We need more information."

"We may not have much time," she said, and looked back down the hallway.

The image--Sapphire lying still, eyes unfocused and dull blue, sightlessly searching the ceiling--he didn't need to look to have it painted behind his eyes. "You're right," he conceded.

"Of course," she said, and gently touched his shoulder. "Only a moment."

The door to the test chamber was closed with a solid metal latch. The sound of the bolt sliding back was almost enough to obscure the noise of the footsteps in the hallway. Steel pushed Sapphire aside even before he saw clearly--the thin man, apparently come out of nowhere, laboratory coat, pencil mustache, pistol in his right hand shaking as he aimed it unsteadily at Steel's chest.

"So this is what you do," the man said. "You come and you destroy people's lives."

Steel took a breath--the gun was modern, would be fatal to a human in a single shot, and he couldn't feel as he ought to the deadly kinematics of the weapon, the hammer and the charge of gunpowder, the mass of the bullet and the velocity of the impact. It was quite possible in this state that the bullet would kill him--could have been the thing which had left him and Sapphire dead in the foyer, however long ago.

"Dr. Witteridge, I presume?" he asked. "It's your research, then."

"It's my life," Witteridge snapped. "It's proof, you see. Of how space and time fold in eleven dimensions. I've harnessed it. This would be impossible if not for my theories."

"And what," Steel nodded at the test room, "is this, exactly?"

The man snorted in disbelief. "You don't know? You just show up intent on destroying things without even knowing what they are?"

"Enlighten us," Sapphire said.

The man smiled angrily. "You know, they'll probably name something after me. A unit of measurement, perhaps. The Witteridge--the energy unit of a second of reversed time."

"Reversed time," Steel repeated, his sense of dread growing. "You've discovered how to move time backward."

"I've discovered how to move backward in time," Witteridge corrected him. "Easily worth a Nobel, I imagine. It's a pity I'll have to kill you two to get that honor."

"You don't have to kill us, Dr. Witteridge," Sapphire said.

"Oh, but I've done it already," the doctor said. "I've seen the bodies--speaking of which, I'll have to clean up the corpses, later. But I will do it. Into the chamber."

"You're making a mistake," Steel said as Sapphire opened the door. "We have been assigned to stop a breach in Time, which your experiment is going to create. If your research does what you say--"

"Oh, it does," Dr. Witteridge said. "But you won't be able to interfere. I'm sending the two of you on a little journey. And by the time you arrive," he smirked, gestured with the pistol. "I'll already be there. Now. Go stand on the X, or I'll shoot you now and move your dead bodies myself. That would be bit of a paradox, unfortunately, but I'm sure I'd manage to work it out."

The test room was colder than the rest of the facility. There was a red X painted on the concrete. Sapphire winced as they took their places on it, and whispered, "Even like this, can you feel it? The breach?"

He could. It was like an ache in the back of his mind. "Yes. It's very close now."

"Perhaps--"

There was a crackling noise, a sensation of motion. Witteridge hit a button on the console and the entire universe turned to white noise.

"The breach--" Steel gasped when he was finally able, and then he was looking into the barrel of Witteridge's pistol again.

He stepped in front of Sapphire even before thinking. They were back in the foyer, he saw--late afternoon, slanting sunlight; the rain hadn't started yet. Wittridge was framed by the windows, pistol in his hand.

Anger, sudden and terrifying, roared through Steel as he stepped forward to confront this--this irresponsible scientist, this fool, this _human._ "You don't understand what you've done," he growled. "The breach you've opened with your reckless experiments needs to be closed, or else the whole of space and time and your precious eleven dimensions will be eradicated!"

Witteridge raised his eyebrows. "I don't believe you," he said, and fired.

Steel had just enough time to curse himself for not being able, not thinking fast enough, to regain his former senses--he had forgotten that they had nothing to fear from seeing the timeline, here and now, that he should have immediately woken those powers within himself again.

And then the bullet stopped in mid-air, inches from his chest. He looked up from its hovering menace to Witteridge's face, and then to the rippling wave behind him, where the breach was coming into view.

Witteridge's face distorted with pain as he slid--backwards, upwards, inwards--into Time, his ideas and his genius and his timeline coming to a sudden end in the breach he had created. And then it snapped shut, as suddenly as it had opened, leaving them alone.

In an instant, Steel opened his mind again, and his sense of Time regained--sudden, shocking stability in the timeline, totally the opposite of what he'd expected. "Sapphire--"

_Quickly, lie down,_ she sent him, laying down herself, limbs splaying carelessly on the carpet. Gingerly he joined her, then went perfectly still as the door behind the desk opened and Witteridge walked out.

A younger Witteridge, by a few hours. One who hadn't met them yet. He gasped, then hesitantly walked over to them, put his fingers to the side of Steel's throat to feel for a pulse. Steel failed to oblige him.

"He killed them, then," Witteridge murmured to himself. He pushed back his sleeve and checked his watch. Outside, rain began pattering against the street. "Time. I need more time..."

He stood, then pulled his pistol out of his pocket and checked it with unsteady hands. Then he opened the door and strolled out into the growing darkness.

_So he told himself what would happen before he apprehended us?_ Steel asked.

_Yes,_ Sapphire replied. _Obviously when he followed us back through time, he gave himself enough leeway to discuss things with his past self. Now, just a few minutes more--_

With the rippling press of time, the two of them stepped into existence mere feet away, then winced and shut their eyes. Steel watched motionless as Sapphire and himself studied the room, the desk--everything but their still forms on the floor. They slipped into the hallway, and a few minutes later Witteridge came back through the lobby, stepped over them, and followed the other Sapphire and Steel through the door.

Steel got up and offered Sapphire a hand to her feet. "So, the breach?"

"It closed up once the paradox was solved," she said. "All I needed to do was move it backward to where it would consume Witteridge."

"Did you?" He raised his eyebrows. "I'm impressed."

Sapphire smiled at him, slightly smug, but only slightly. "Thank you for the distraction."

"So all that remains to do--"

"Is wait until they've gone and destroy the equipment, yes," she said.

"A very neat puzzle." Steel smiled. "I am very glad that you aren't dead."

"And the same to you," Sapphire said. "Let's put the thought behind us."


End file.
